After School Thoughts

Another year is wasting away in innumerable township havens of poverty’s sting paralyzing our country’s economy, and young adults and their children are camping under faded trees with dreams burnt dry by the heavy rays of failure.

Many having given to drink and others suicide, schools are a distant memory or a distant prospect in a world known for perpetual plight and misery.

Last year’s student protestations left college gates choking with aspirant scholars who cannot be accommodated and while townships sink into disparate mires of criminal infestation, these monuments of the education industrial complex fleece millions of students who cannot even afford a loaf of bread.

Destitute young women will soon be parading bellies ripening with fatherless fetuses, while the mining industrial complex reassembles and repurposes desperation of lethargic young males towards its own damning tortures fueled by narcissistic dreams.

It cannot be denied that in less than three decades, we have observed a catastrophic demise of the South African education system, which has by all means been under siege due to a number of factors and inevitable alterations in the objective demands guiding our country’s democratic project.

Constitutional mandates required hordes of black students to make it through colleges and universities, and through this race for a skilled workforce, many compromises had to be made and valuable integrity traded for rapid inclusion into the radical economic development machine.

When global education is seemingly flourishing in other economies, South Africa’s education institutions are now imploding, and a process of de-development is underway from kindergarten to lecture halls.

Observe how the auspicious move towards raising graduate numbers among black pupils has seen an opposite effect, where many black students realized that they were utilized as pawns in the initial stages of the devaluation of educational content for the creation of factory workers consumed by debt and unreachable dreams.

And now our country is experiencing a drop-out boom, and a vast number of matriculants are not even equipped to enter tertiary level education due to sub-standard education inculcated throughout basic and secondary education stages.

While the higher education industry is advocating for more financial inclusion of under-resourced and needy students, many young people are resisting because they now recognize college education as an over-priced social marker than a tool in their pursuit for personal goals of ‘a good life’.

The brittle or broken education system needs to admit that it also failed by watering down classical education for mass consumption of the previously disadvantaged black people at primary and secondary school levels.

The so-called Outcome Based Education system has inadvertently created a crisis of illiterate automatons who seldom can spell, read or critically analyze any written text from a logical stand point.

The root of these failures lies with the people entrusted with running these institutions; most of them being products of other mediocre education systems of course, but what is the purpose of this stupefying mediocritization of our present curricula disseminated at primary and secondary school?

Does our government mean to work this hard and expensively to create an under-educated population?

Where does our country’s education system rank in world ratings for best science for instance, or mathematics, biology and other classical studies which produce diverse experts of international renown?

As opposed to our present state run compulsory schooling, I believe schools should aim to be vestiges of classical education, but over the past couple of decades our education has been inextricably tied to capitalist global psychological warfare agenda, whose main weapon of engagement is always media.

The entertainment industrial complex is unquestionably more pervasive in townships where it creates reality bubbles which deny true realities of poverty, exploitation and economic servitude any consideration by minds obsessed with Beyonce’s hairstyle.

And some of these dreams proliferated through media, these consumerist tendencies bred by a staple diet of exuberant affluence are what has created a fast food education system through which many imagine quick fixes towards economic emancipation.

Fictional wars are fought by gaming teenagers avoiding ‘homework’, through joystick adrenalin injections and fake bullets maiming characters in virtual battle zones. 

But what happens when our entertainment is pent of programming a militarized population who will never flinch at the sight of blood?

Our schools seem to continually weaponise knowledge themselves, creating competitive automatons who are only experts in specific fields of study and therefore work, who cannot branch out of compartmentised utilization of their mental faculties.

Schools have truly become prisons with books.

Many economists often attribute the low wage growth in the country to educational stagnation and a tertiary education system that prepares the next generation for jobs that won’t exist.

On the cusp of this  ‘a dropout revolution’ as we can call this new paradigm of social transformation, many graduates for instance, now feel obsolete in today’s information economy and many are joining the unemployed emerging from either professional or informal work that is now performed by overseas sweatshop slave labor or by machines.

And a great number seldom recovers from joblessness of course, when living within an economy relegated to ‘Junk Status’ by ratings agencies, with an ever exploding population inundated with poverty and ceaseless unemployment.

And what we are now observing is a counter stance where many have embraced a freedom to fail, dropouts getting pregnant and giving birth to children without homes and family support.

Young men will be joining their unemployed fathers and uncles at shebeens to suppress the ever growing depression that yields many powerless and despotic.

How the majority of disenfranchised youth react to the incipient economic biases created by defective educational initiatives is yet to be witnessed, more intensely and violently than the recent fees protestations.

What I find it interesting as well is how the bank(ruptcy)ing system’s generosity is becoming increasingly linked to ‘higher rates of entrepreneurship’ through loans and over-drafts to newly employed adults, and having seen how many efforts by the youth are towards battling the stranglehold of pennilessness, indeed poverty has created an ever increasingly desperate breed of entrepreneurs and loan seekers.

Anarchist squatters are mushrooming in every city across the country, mainly comprising of politicized youth who have been discarded by the wage system, education system and even family systems. And not surprisingly, the anxiety about the invalidity of ballot promises has also given these disenfranchised masses a common enemy in this age of plenty for a few.

Desktop employment is otherwise the alternative cult among those who cannot do professions which require brain work, and of course, this could justifiably be labeled as another superstitious wish and a philosophical tabloid preached by yet another deranged evangelist of a type of school system that 

NEVER numbs down our human intelligence.

But let our INTELLIGENCE GROW as we will it.